People perceive robots as humans not objects

University of Canterbury
(UC) research has found people perceive robots, not as
objects, but as humans.

UC researchers Christoph
Bartneck and Jakub Zlotowski said there was societal
relevance on how people will deal with robots in the near
future.

``Our experiment showed that we do perceive
robots not as objects, but more like humans and this is
based on functions of the brain that are very deep down.
This probably will have the consequence that we will treat
robots, to some degree, like humans,’’ Dr Bartneck said
today.

He and PhD student Zlotowski conducted a study
on the inversion effect with images of robots in UC’s
Human Interface Technology laboratory.

Zlotowski said
certain types of images were harder to recognise when tipped
upside down compared to when they are shown upright.
Previous studies showed that this phenomenon affects images
of people’s faces and body postures, but not objects.

``It is not more difficult to recognize objects whether
they are presented upright or upside down, but it is more
difficult to recognise human body postures presented upside
down than when they are upright. Apparently, this effect is
due to different processing of these two types of
stimuli.

``What we investigated in our study, is
whether images of robots can be recognised as humans or
objects. We expected that that the more human looking
robots would exhibit stronger inversion effect than
machine-like robots.

``Interestingly, we found that
despite using images of various robots they were perceived
cognitively more like humans than objects.’’

Zlotowski said development of technology in recent years
allowed production of robots that were not operating in
factories or laboratories, but in natural human
environments.

The first commercially available
service robots were designed to do tasks such as mowing,
mopping or vacuuming. However, the range of tasks that they
are capable of achieving increases rapidly and robots can be
found in theatres (actors), shopping malls (shopping
assistants) or museums (tour guides).

There were also
robots which take pets’ role and build an emotional
relationship with their users or which are used in patient
therapy, he said.

It is highly likely that further
development of technology will spur their introduction in
even more contexts. They will be assigned more roles and
become a natural part of human working and living space as
was the case with other technology like computers and mobile
phones.

``However, it will still take several decades
before robots will be capable of behaving as depicted in
sci-fi movies and books, such as Blade Runner or
Wall-E.’’

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